BN on the brain

DEAN JOHNS

In case anybody noticed last week’s absence of my column fromMalaysiakini, my excuse if not justification is that I had to rush to complete my final university assignment of the year. An essay, as it happens, on the raving misogyny that infests the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

This strikes me as somewhat paradoxical, in view of the fact that one of my principal original aims in returning to academia was to regain the use of my brain after too many years of reading and writing about Malaysia’s mind-blowingly mad, bad BN regime.

Yet here I’ve found myself slaving away over Nietzsche, the very man whose manic writings about sex, race, power and supremacy have been appropriated, perverted and employed to propagandise every group of fascist goons from the Nazis to Barisan Nasional.

So here I am again with BN on the brain. But at least I can console myself that at least I’m not suffering from that far more dreaded and deadly of mental, emotional and ethical diseases afflicting the members, cronies and supporters of this criminal and incompetent regime, BN of the brain.

Of course this is not the innocent, everyday form of dementia from which so many innocent people tragically suffer, and which, among other hypothetical possibilities like syphilis, chloral hydrate abuse, brain cancer and hereditary insanity, may have been the cause of the above-mentioned Nietzsche’s mental incapacitation for the last 11 years of his life.

The BN brand of dementia is entirely self-inflicted or else feigned for the purposes of power and personal profit. In fact on further thought, it isn’t real dementia at all, and to keep calling it such serves only to give an honest if horrible disease a bad name. So from here on in, I propose to refer to BN’s brain-dead desire for power and domination by the more appropriate term ‘domentia’, and its deranged lust for money ‘doughmentia’.

Of course, as Sydney University Student News coincidentally informs me in its latest e-dition, the most common cause of genuine dementia is the awful Alzheimer’s Disease. And of course this is very much evident in BN circles in a variety of mutant forms.

Alcoheimer’s Disease, for example, whose symptoms are forgetting, and trying to ensure that the Malaysian people either forget or remain brainlessly ignorant of the fact that members and cronies of the BN regime have a great many shares if not majority interests in breweries, and that companies with family and other close connections to this ever-sanctimonious Muslim-majority gang of thieves have been granted ‘directly-negotiated’ or in other words corrupt monopolies for the supply of liquor-bottle labels.

Then there’s Allaheimer’s Disease, a mental malady apparently unique to Malaysia among all the Muslim-majority nations and Islamic states in the world, whose chief symptoms are forgetting or fanatically and fantastically denying the incontrovertible fact that ‘Allah’ is the generic Arabic word for the ‘God’ of the Muslim, Jewish and Christian religions; and a burning desire to ban the use of the word by non-Muslims.

Ibrahim Aliheimer’s Disease

And a closely-related intellectual impairment to this one is Ibrahim Aliheimer’s Disease, whose manifestations include insane urges on the part of individuals and fake ‘non-government’ organisations to abuse and threaten non-Muslims for imaginary alleged threats and insults to Islam, and for the regime to forget or refuse to admit that it funds these sectarian scum with public money.

Of course arguably the most fatal of BN’s congenital Alzheimer-related diseases, at least to those unfortunates who fall into the clutches of those who make it their business to spread it around, is Assassheimer’s.

A mania for killing those who pose a threat to the demented, domented, doughmented BN regime’s criminal members, as the hapless Mongolian ‘model’ Altantuya Shaariibuu did in the Scorpene Submarines affair, or have the misfortune to fall into the hands of its police or anti-corruption commission.

And of course the other effect of Assassheimer’s is to cause total amnesia among the killers, their accomplices and accessories before and after the fact of these crimes, not to mention an attorney-general’s department that long ago forgot its duty to prosecute them, and the promotion of as much memory-loss in the populace as possible by means of the lamebrain ‘mainstream’ media.

According to the Student News report mentioned above, the latest findings by the Regenerative Neuroscience Group at Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Research Institute (BMRI), while most if not all forms of dementia including Alzheimer’s are so far incurable, professionally-supervised “group-based brain training is effective at improving performance in a range of cognitive skills in healthy older adults”.

But, says Regenerative Neuroscience Group leader Associate Professor Michael Valenzuela, “commercial products promoted for solo training use at home just don’t work. There are better ways to spend your time and money.”

Unfortunately the professor didn’t mention whether going back to uni and straining one’s brain by writing essays about long-dead demented philosophers achieves anything in the senility-slowing department.

But if my experience with my latest efforts in this regard, there is a very fine line between productively exercising one’s mental faculties and utterly exhausting them.

Not that this has any particular relevance to all those millions of Malaysians who realise they’ve been out of their minds to have tolerated, let alone voted for or failed to vote against the demented, indeed outright deranged BN regime all these years.

That it’s way past time to get rid of this gang of criminal kleptomaniacs is a total no-brainer. But unfortunately BN-style domentia, doughmentia, Alcoheimer’s, Allaheimer’s, Ibrahim Aliheimer’s and Assassheimer’s are no more curable than ordinary dementia and Alzheimer’s.

So it’s high time the citizens of Malaysia got wise to the fact that they will never relieve themselves of their dead-head BN regime by thinking, wishing, hoping or otherwise using their brains, and started, people-power style, using their brawn.